Scottsboro Case Summary

The famous Scottsboro case began on March twenty fifth nineteen thirty one on one of the Southern Railroad’s trains that was to travel from Chattanooga to Memphis. On this particular day there was approximately twenty four people “hoboing” or hitching a ride on the top of the train most of whom were young males. Among the twenty four riders there were nine african american teenagers four of whom men were from Chattanooga and were traveling to Memphis to investigate rumors about their being government jobs available in Memphis hauling logs along the river. The other five teenagers were from various towns around Georgia. Also on the train were four young whites, two of whom were male and the other two were female, all of whom were returning from
E. Hawkins. Their defense lawyers, Stephen Roddy and Milo Moody were completely incompetent with Roddy being a unprepared real estate who on the first day of trial showed up so drunk he couldn’t even walk straight. Moody wasn’t much better because even though he was a local attorney he hadn’t tried a case in decades. These defense lawyers showed their incompetence in a variety of ways, such as only cross-examining Victoria Price for a few minutes, while not even bothering to examine the doctors who looked into the women’s rape claim at all. Also even though six of the boys denied having ever seen the women before, Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris and Roy Wright admitted to the rape and stated that the rest of the defendants were involved as well because of the beatings and threats they had received while in jail. All of this resulted in all of the boys being found guilty and all but the youngest, twelve year old Roy Wright being sentenced to
Weems was paroled in 1943, while Powell and Norris were paroled in 1946. The last to be parolled was Wright who was allowed to leave in June of 1950. The last one Patterson managed to escape in 1948 and flee managed to flee to Michigan where he was protected by the governor of Michigan Mennen Williams who refused to extradite Patterson to Alabama to face trial. However, three years later he would be convicted of manslaughter after having allegedly stabbed another African American to death and died in prison. The last known surviving Scottsboro boy was Norris who after flee to the north after his parole in 1946 was finally granted a full pardon in 1976 by the Governor of Alabama. It wouldn’t be until eighty years after they were falsely accused of the crime that in 2013 Patterson, Weems, and Wright were finally pardoned by the state of Alabama finally giving justice to the last of the Scottsboro